When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño. Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late - the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life - which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist - expose the raw suture of fiction and reality.

His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized - to what degree, the author isn't sure - with the Pinochet regime. After enjoying my recent reads of Alejandro Zambra’s short-story collection My Documents and the novella The Private Lives of Trees, I thought I might have a quick browse through my local library database to see if they had any more of the Chilean writer’s work. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl.

A brilliant novel from 'the herald of a new wave of Chilean fiction' The NationĪlejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middle-class housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile.

Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra